


You Take Your Choice At This Time

by Edonohana



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 22:10:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13109514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: Ka is a wheel; its one purpose is to turn.





	You Take Your Choice At This Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



The gunslinger stumbled across the vast emptiness of the desert. The sky hung low overhead, hot and hard and featureless as a baking sheet just pulled from the oven. The sand was white and dry as bone; the sand _was_ bone, ground down by the mill of time to the texture of flour, a fine pale dust that burned the eyes and choked the lungs. Not even cactus or devil grass grew from the sterile powder. In that soft dead plain, no insects crawled and no birds sang. There was no water, not a single raindrop nor a bead of dew, not even the pretty poison of alkali lakes. 

It had been two days since the gunslinger's canteens had run dry. It takes three days for thirst to kill a man, they say, but heat and exertion bake the water from the body and kill you all the quicker. But it was too late to turn back, and useless to hunker down. There was nowhere to go but forward. One more step after the witch; one more step toward the rose. 

If Susan was to die here in the desert, her quest unfulfilled, it was still a better death than the charyou tree, or bleeding her life away with that of her child born too soon. She’d come close enough to both of those to taste death’s kiss, but had somehow shied away. If it was only so that she could come to this moment, so be it. She would die on her feet, with a song on her lips. 

Susan swallowed, but her mouth was too parched to sing. She tried to hum, but the vibration made the dry tissues of her throat rasp together painfully. So she kept silent, and sang in her mind alone:

_Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadow?_  
_Does she have another baby, standing in the shadow?_  
_I see that you’ve come to realize_  
_in here the darkness has eyes._

She blinked painfully, her eyelids scraping across her swollen eyes. The shape up ahead wasn’t a dune. It was a building, white and dry as the powder sand. And a shadowed figure stood in front of it, leaning carelessly against the wall, a black silhouette in the blinding sun. Susan drew both her guns and ran forward, trying to scream her fury. Only a thin and rasping wail emerged from her throat, but that didn’t matter; her guns would speak for her.

Then she skidded to a stop, her arms falling to her sides. The figure wasn’t the witch. It wasn’t even a woman. The person standing before her was a child, no more than five years old. 

Pain stabbed behind Susan’s eyes. Her hands shaking, she barely managed to holster her guns before her legs crumpled beneath her. 

She was only vaguely aware of her knees thudding into the ground. Dizzily, with will alone keeping her conscious, she forced her head up. The child was approaching her, holding something out. 

It was fresh water. Susan could smell it. Unable to speak, she could do nothing but watch as the child offered her a china cup with delicate blue webbing around the rim.

“Go on, drink,” said the little brown-skinned girl. “Isn’t the cup pretty? It’s forspecial.”


End file.
